Those slaughtered were non-Arabs like them, mostly members of the Massalit tribe to which she and her family belong, so they fled. Her mother fell ill and died, so Souad, her brother and three sisters moved in with their aunt and uncle. Fighting continued to spread from town to town. One day in November 2024, Souad went to the local market to buy falafel to feed her siblings. "When I got there, it had been taken over by fighters from the RSF," she says. "One of them grabbed my wrist and pulled me into an empty shop." He raped her, then issued his warning. "When she came home, I saw her face and asked what had happened," her aunt, Najat, recalls. But Souad kept silent. "That fighter's face and his gun and knife came to my nightmares every night," she says. Souad's family are among a million Sudanese who have fled and crossed into neighbouring Chad, settling in makeshift camps scattered across the border. The largest is in the town of Adré, where a so-called Spontaneous Camp that sprang up on the scrubby desert now hosts more than 160,000 refugees, four times the local population of about 40,000. After they had been in Adré for a while, Souad became sick. "I took her to a clinic, then the doctor came out and asked me how old she was," says Najat. "I said 12. Then he told me she was pregnant. I was shocked." The doctor told her Souad was too young to deliver and advised an abortion, but the family refused. "The baby was already more than three months and it is against Islam," Najat says. Now 13, Souad, who should be at school playing with her friends, instead sits plucking at the hem of her long black and white dress, eight-month-old baby Suma on her shoulder. A child herself who cries every night, with a baby daughter born of the worst day of her short life. We meet in the Zahra Centre for survivors of sexual violence, a small shelter of woven grass inside the Spontaneous Camp, started by Zahra Khamis, a Sudanese psychologist whose own 17-year-old son was killed as th…
It feels like humanity has died in Sudan: Half a million people have fled slaughter and rape. In camps dominated by women and girls in Chad, their nightmare continues archive.ph/2EAGD By @christinalamb.bsky.social #Sudan #massrape #sexualviolence
